Trail Mix

* ``I'll trade you my laser for that stove,'' said Wayne ``Professor'' Lummis, a thru-hiker from Virginia amusing himself by shining a flashlight-size laser at me as we cooked supper.

It wasn't the only offer I've had for the stove, a 6-inch-long steel cylinder with coils at one end. When I hold a match to the coils, flaming gas spews from a small hole at the base of the cylinder. I adjust the flame by turning a screw.

Thirty-two years ago, when I bought the stove in Intervale, N.H., it was state-of-the-art stuff. Now it's an antique.

The stove is Swiss-made. It came in a cardboard box labeled, ``Benzine Burner.''

It's lighter and smaller than most modern camp stoves. But it has disadvantages. Wind will blow out its flame. Since the stove has no cooking surface, I have to balance my cookpot on rocks, set on either side of the stove.

My good wife, Jane, calls my stove ``an explosion waiting to happen.'' But I wouldn't trade it for the Professor's laser or anything else.

It is the lone piece of equipment left from my 1960's era backpacking outfit -- an outfit that once included a 1944 army surplus backboard. With the backboard came directions for tying on a field artillery gun.

I've happily retired the painfully uncomfortable backboard, and my Woolrich shirt and sweater that soaked up rain on trips to the mountains.

But never my Benzine Burner.

* Was this really possible? A mountain shelter filled with thru-hikers -- the elite, mind you, the ones who make it to Maine -- and half of them smoking or chewing tobacco?

It's true.

Thru-hikers will tell you that somewhere between 20 percent and 50 percent of them smoke. For some, it's a butt or two a day. Others go through a pack or more in 24 hours, while knocking off 15-mile days.

Kevin ``Ulysees'' Grant, 23, from South Portland, Maine, rolls two to three cigarettes a day from his pouch of Drum tobacco. ``Sometimes you find yourself bored in the woods,'' he says, ``and smoking is something to do.''

``Professor'' Lummis, who offered to trade for my camp stove, smokes a pack and a half of Camel Lites every day. He says he enjoys astonishing people.

``If you really want to shock the weekend hiker,'' he said, ``you beat him up the mountain, then light a butt as he makes it over the top.''

By the way, the thru-hikers I met carried their spent butts out of the forest.

* I watched, fascinated, as April Greene of Portland had a lizard tattooed on her left leg. At the time I was researching a story on tattoos for the style section of my newspaper.

I knew it would be a good story, but it was nothing personal to me -- not until Greene told me that she picked a lizard because they climb rocks. Rock climbing, it turned out, is her favorite sport.

A light flashed.

The Appalachian Trail project that I'd thought about night and day for months was two weeks away. How wonderful it would be, I thought, to hit the mountains with a symbol of the hike -- the circled arrow symbol of the trail -- printed forever on my body.

I found a photo of the symbol and took it to Portland Tattoo. The tattooist enlarged it and put a carbon image on my left calf, where every hiker could see it there.